Lord Patten: “… the problem at heart is not the sausages you get from Sainsbury’s but the porkies that we all get … from Downing Street”

Chris Patten delivering inaugural Seamus Mallon Lecture for Hume Foundation over Zoom

Lord Patten delivered the inaugural Seamus Mallon Lecture this evening, organised by the The John & Pat Hume Foundation. His talk looked back at his time as a direct rule minister: “An appointment to the Northern Ireland Office was often compared with being sent by a Communist Party general secretary in the Soviet Union to manage a power station in Siberia.” He recalled some of his encounters with Seamus Mallon, wishing that there were: “more political leaders in Northern Ireland …

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David O’Sullivan: The EU at 70 – still going strong?

Watch back this evening’s Hume Foundation inaugural European Spirit of Peace Lecture, delivered by David O’Sullivan (former EU ambassador to the US) which looked at the EU 70 years on and asked whether it was going strong. He had cautionary words for those conflating the Irish constitutional issue with practical aspects of the NI Protocol which he said was “unhelpful” and could “destabilise many in the Unionist community”.

“We can begin with the empowerment of civic society, by bringing about participative and deliberative democracy”

Maureen Hetherington spoke about the need to empower civic society and bring about participative and deliberative democracy in her contribution to a panel on A Shared Home Place – the Unfinished Business of Reconciliation, recorded last week in Derry’s Guildhall and organised by the John & Pat Hume Foundation.

Watch the launch of the John and Pat Hume Foundation today at 11am…

A foundation in the name of former Nobel Peace Prize Winner, John Hume, and his wife Pat Hume, will launch today at 11am. The John and Pat Hume Foundation will seek to advance non-violent and peaceful change-making for present and future generations in divided societies and support and inspire leadership for peaceful change at home and across the world through a series of outreach and support programmes. The Foundation’s Leadership and Board is composed of people, from diverse backgrounds and communities, …

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